Marco Arment: "Everyone should play by the same rules. A proposal: storage capacities referenced or implied in the names or advertisements for personal computers, tablets, and smartphones should not exceed the amount of space available for end-user installation of third-party applications and data, after enough software has been installed to enable all commonly advertised functionality. With today's OSes, iPads could advertise capacities no larger than 12, 28, 60, and 124 GB and the Surface Pros could be named 23 and 83 GB." Wholly agreed. When I buy a box of 100 staples, I expect it to contain ~100 staples - not 50 because the other 50 are holding the box together.

This discrepancy has never been a problem. It's absolutely natural that you lose _some_ of the built-in memory to the operating system.

But it was Microsoft who went too far. It's a huge different whether the operating system takes less than 5% of the total disk space as compared taking more than 60%.

Please don't throw Apple, Google and all the other sane software companies into the same bag. It's Microsoft who are nuts in porting a fully fledged desktop operating system onto a mobile device, not the other computers.

Move everything related to Windows 8 and Surface to the trashcan and start from scratch.

But it was Microsoft who went too far. It's a huge different whether the operating system takes less than 5% of the total disk space as compared taking more than 60%.

Agreed. Sure, it's impossible to draw a line between what's acceptable and what's not, but few people will be upset if a small proportion of their advertised storage is eaten up by the system. Losing more than half of that storage is a rather different matter.